For anyone who can't be bothered watching a new show to find out whether it's any good. Our team of writers review and recap the anime you've missed or should miss, bringing to your attention the best and worst anime.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Blood+ Finale on Adult Swim

This weekend [AS] reached the end of a long, tortuous road: Blood+ reached its fiftieth, and final, episode, and no one cared. Maybe someone liked this show; maybe they cried a little bit at the very end; maybe that person and I could get along and be friends, but I somehow doubt that.

This was, quite simply, a horrible series. So horrible, in fact, that “horrible” is quite frankly too weak a word to use. An atrocious series. An abominable achievement. An abortion of animation. It’s that bad. A storyline that could have comfortably fit 20 episodes was stretched into a bloated 50. The characters were nothing more than cardboard cutout stereotypes. In some episodes, the dialogue seemed to consist of every other line being “SAYA!” The plot, oh the plot. Where did it ever make any sense? The animation wasn’t very good, either. Awful, just awful.

I don’t know what was worse: that thousands of man-hours were dedicated to creating this monument of crapulence, or that I watched most of the episodes, thus letting go of tiny little slices of my life that I could been using to—I don’t know—drink beer or sleep. I’ve been trying to recall some of the better moments of the show, so that I can at least point to one moment or two and say, “Well, maybe this one scene validated all of that,” but I just can’t.

All I can think of was the one episode, maybe 32, where Diva invaded the crew’s cruise liner so that she could molest Riku. However, the scene, the idea—much like they very concept and execution of this entire series—turned out vulgar and crass, instead of achieving the haunting sublimity that we wanted so much.